14 January 2011

Based on the hit South Korean movie, My Sassy Girl, the character backgrounds and plot details will be changed for the drama. While the protagonists in the original film were college students, this time the pair will be a marine biology professor, Masaki Saburo, and Takami Riko, an aspiring writer...

If you look at them just right, the most mundane elements of daily life can seem utterly bizarre. Conversely, the strangest, most inexplicable things can seem perfectly ordinary. That’s the lunatic logic behind Funky Forest, a sprawling omnibus of the obvious and the oddball, the casual and the completely insane. If you’re reading this in hopes of being handed a sensible synopsis of a straightforward story, you’re out of luck – Funky Forest’s daringly disjointed narrative is a mish-mash of blackouts, non-sequiturs, flashbacks, lucid dreams, magical moments and so much more. Awkward stumbles on the path to romance, and others of life’s little disappointments, are woven together with all sorts of extraterrestrial freaks and incomprehensible biological curiosities, music-video mayhem and mind-bending theatrics, and psychedelic surrealism of the finest grade, delivered with a deadpan shrug.

After a retreat to the atmospheric and spectral Loft and Retribution that reinforce Kiyoshi Kurosawa's reputation as a horror filmmaker, Tokyo Sonata continues in the vein of his idiosyncratically personal (and arguably, more interesting), yet equally unsettling films that began with Bright Future. As the film begins, the family patriarch, middle-aged senior administrative manager, Ryuhei (Teruyuki Kagawa) has been notified that the company has outsourced his job to China (where his salary would pay for three language-fluent office workers) and, without portable skills that could be applied to another department, will be immediately laid off from work. Reluctant to tell his family for fear of undermining his authority, Ryuhei continues the pretext of leaving for work with his briefcase each morning, spending his days alternately lining up at a job placement office and a charity lunch service on the park. Meanwhile, his stay-at-home wife, Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi), has begun to feel trapped in her unappreciated role of keeping the household together, her newly obtained driver's license symbolizing her liberated, if guilty step away from the familiar routines of domestic life (a search for identity implied by her intended use of the license as a form of identification). Their university-aged son, Takashi (Yu Koyanagi) is similarly adrift in his part-time job distributing flyers on the streets, and sees a provision for foreigners enlisting in the U.S. military as a means of asserting his independence. Younger son, Kenji (Kai Inowaki), having been caught passing a manga book in the classroom, stages his own minor rebellion: exposing the teacher's own penchant for reading erotic themed manga on the train, and subsequently, taking piano lessons against his father's objection. Inspired by the four-movement structure of a sonata, Tokyo Sonata is a humorous and incisive modernist (and globalist) evocation of the shomin-geki salaryman picture popularized by Yasujiro Ozu, chronicling the increasingly divergent lives of the Sasaki family who, like the families in Ozu's cinema are on the verge of disintegration. However, while both filmmakers reflect the inevitability of this dissolution, Kurosawa paradoxically sees the rupture as a necessary trauma towards rebuilding - a sense of renewal that is reflected in the parting image of the family leaving the stage, figuratively stepping away from the performance to forge their own path in the uncertain darkness.

12 January 2011

Early 1983 summer and bone-Ming city, county deer child see Sawamura. Year ago, the Dragon King's palace ceremony from the Kou Nai's parents married, her father arrived with the child Misawa remote villages, into the roar very small number of high school campuses. More recently, came from Tokyo to a turn-school - Day - Maehara Keiichi tuck. The class leader Park Kawasaki CMD, as the mysterious qualities of the ancient shrine dancers Yuet hand pear, like the mischievous son of the North of drift sand ha ....

A schoolgirl named Rika goes to visit her grandfather, who she hasn’t seen for two years. When she gets to the small town that he lives in, she discovers that it is overrun with zombies. With the help of a clumsy dude and her high school friend, she makes her way to grandpa’s house, where they must fight more zombies. In the process, Rika is bitten and attacked. Her senile old grandfather, a master surgeon, amputates her arm and attaches the arm of a dead zombie hunter… turning her into a zombie killing machine. Now the motley crew must find the zombie boss and take it down before the U.S. drops a bomb on all their asses. It sounds pretty straightforward, but the presence of boob-flashing maids, giant zombie monsters, and a strange zombie doctor makes things interesting… and anything but straightforward.

05 January 2011

In the year 2047, an alien life-form codenamed FOS invades Earth and smashes through the world's major cities in one wave. The earth unites to fight back and puts up a Diffuser in place to stop further invasions 3 years after. Now in 2053, a plan is made for a last counterattack that must disable the Diffuser for an offensive...and Akeshima Taishi, who lost his father to the FOS when they first invaded, may finally get his revenge.